nslations Cowper made for Mr. Bull, added some
versions of his own and written a pleasing preface about this gentle
seventeenth-century saint whose life was her best, indeed her only true
poem.

Mr. Pierce has discovered a tenth muse and writes impassioned verses to
the Goddess of Chess whom he apostrophises as 'Sublime Caissa'! Zukertort
and Steinitz are his heroes, and he is as melodious on mates as he is
graceful on gambits. We are glad to say, however, that he has other
subjects, and one of his poems beginning:

Cedar boxes deeply cut,
China bowls of quaint device,
Heap'd with rosy leaves and spice,
Violets in old volumes shut--

is very dainty and musical.

Mr. Clifford Harrison is well known as the most poetic of our reciters,
but as a writer himself of poetry he is not so famous. Yet his little
volume In Hours of Leisure contains some charming pieces, and many of the
short fourteen-line poems are really pretty, though they are very
defective in form. Indeed, of form Mr. Harrison is curiously careless.
Such rhymes as 'calm' and 'charm,' 'baize' and 'place,' 'jeu' and 'knew,'
are quite dreadful, while 'operas' and 'stars,' 'Gautama' and 'afar' are
too bad even for Steinway Hall. Those who have Keats's genius may borrow
Keats's cockneyisms, but from minor poets we have a right to expect some
regard to the ordinary technique of verse. However, if Mr. Harrison has
not always form, at least he has always feeling. He has a wonderful
command over all the egotistic emotions, is quite conscious of the
artistic value of remorse, and displays a sincere sympathy with his own
moments of sadness, playing upon his moods as a young lady plays upon the
piano. Now and then we come across some delicate descriptive touches,
such as

The cuckoo knew its latest day had come,
And told its name once more to all the hills,

and whenever Mr. Harrison writes about nature he is certainly pleasing
and picturesque but, as a rule, he is over-anxious about himself and
forgets that the personal expression of joy or sorrow is not poetry,
though it may afford excellent material for a sentimental diary.

The daily increasing class of readers that likes unintelligible poetry
should study AEonial. It is in many ways a really remarkable production.
Very fantastic, very daring, crowded with strange metaphor and clouded by
monstrous imagery, it has a sort of turbid splendour about it, and should
the author some